Translating “Intense Poetic Prose” in World Literature : Comparing Han Kang’s Greek Lessons and Its Translation

While scholarship in new world literature has widely examined the circulation and accessibility of globally mobile texts in translation, the distinctive challenges posed by experimental or poetic prose have received little scholarly attention. This paper asks for a renewed engagement with the politics of translation by foregrounding the heightened aesthetic, ethical, and political responsibilities translators assume when rendering experimental literary language, especially from non-English texts into English. Following South Korean writer Han Kang’s Nobel Prize recognition for her “intense poetic prose,” this paper investigates the challenges of translating such linguistic specificity into English. Focusing on Greek Lessons and its original Korean counterpart 희랍어 시간 (Huirabeo Sigan), this paper explores how these books participate in the discourse of new world literature. It begins by analyzing the back cover texts of both editions, which frame the relational dynamic between the two protagonists in markedly different ways. Central to this divergence is the Korean word “기척 (gicheok)”, a term imbued with sensory subtlety and fleeting presence. While the Korean edition foregrounds gicheok as essential to understanding the characters’ unstable yet intimate connection, the English version does not gesture toward its nuance. This paper calls for translation practices that remain attentive to culturally and linguistically embedded meanings. In doing so, it positions translation as an intimate and ethical act of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural engagement.